My most-liked photo ever wasn’t planned.
It was a wet April morning on King Street. I had a camera. There was a puddle. And for about four seconds, everything lined up.
3,300+ likes. My next-best sat at 618.
So I went back and looked hard at why it worked. Not to replicate it — you can’t replicate luck — but to understand what I did right so I can be more ready when luck shows up again.
This is the breakdown.
The scene: what I was actually looking at
King Street West. Post-rain. The TTC streetcar was approaching — car 4555, route 37. A motorcycle courier in a blue jacket was threading past on the left. A few pedestrians stood on the right.
None of that is unusual for downtown Toronto. You could shoot that scene a hundred times.
What made it different was the puddle.
It wasn’t a small puddle. It stretched across most of the lane — deep enough, still enough, and wide enough to act as a mirror. The streetcar’s reflection was almost complete: the red body, the headlights, the overhead wire lines, all inverted in the water.
The scene had two streetcars: one real, one reflected. That doubling is the whole photograph.
The gear
- Body: Fujifilm GFX100RF
- Focal length: 35mm
- Aperture: f/8
- Shutter speed: 1/160s
- ISO: 500
- File format: RAW (.RAF), cropped in post from 101.8 MP to 20.1 MP (3886 × 5181)
The camera position: this is where the shot lives or dies
I got low.
Not “bent-over” low. I mean, camera-almost-on-the-pavement low — the kind of position that makes people walking past think something is wrong with you.
That position did three things:
1. It made the reflection fill the foreground. Shoot this standing up, and the puddle shrinks to a strip at the bottom of the frame. Get the camera near the water surface, and the reflection expands — it becomes half the photograph instead of an afterthought.
2. It created a natural horizon line. The edge of the puddle separates the real world above from the reflected world below. That line gives the composition structure without any effort. It’s just geometry.
3. It compressed the distance to the streetcar. At a low angle, the streetcar looms. It fills the frame. Combined with the reflection stretching toward the lens, you get a sense of scale and motion that a standing shot wouldn’t give you.
If you take one thing from this post, the position is the decision. The camera settings matter. The puddle matters. But getting low is the non-negotiable move.
Composition: what I kept and what I ignored
What anchored the frame
The streetcar and its reflection form a vertical axis through the centre. That’s the spine of the image. Everything else arranges itself around it.
The reflection lines — the wet road surface, the overhead wire reflections — pull the eye from the bottom of the frame straight up to the approaching car. You don’t have to direct the viewer. The geometry does it.
What the motorcycle courier added
The blue jacket on the left is the only real colour in the frame. Everything else is grey, red, and white.
That blue accent matters. Without it, the left side of the frame is empty and the composition tips right. The courier is a counter-weight — and the colour break tells your eye “this is a street, with a person in it.” It keeps the photo from feeling like a transit ad.
I didn’t plan the courier. But I didn’t leave without him in the frame either. You learn to wait for the pieces.
What I ignored
The pedestrians on the right are there but secondary. They confirm “urban scene” without competing. I wasn’t trying to shoot a street portrait — I was shooting the streetcar — so I let them exist without making them the point.
The reflection: how to get it clean
Reflections in puddles are temperamental. Wind kills them. Passing vehicles kill them. Ripples from raindrops kill them.
Here’s what you need:
Still water. The rain has to have stopped. Even a light drizzle breaks the surface. Wait for the pause after the storm.
Depth of water. A thin film of water reflects light but won’t give you a clean mirror image. You need actual standing water, deep enough that the reflection has something to form in.
Low angle + proximity. As described above. The closer to the surface, the better the reflection reads.
Timing. The streetcar was approaching. I didn’t want it stopped — stopped streetcars sit flat and static. I wanted it moving toward me, close enough that the headlights were live and bright. That meant I had a narrow window: too far away and it’s small; too close and I lose the reflection geometry.
1/160s was fast enough to freeze the motion without blurring the headlights into blobs.
Post-processing: what I did
The unedited RAW is flat, grey, and wide. The published image is none of those things. Here’s what changed:
The crop was the biggest decision. The GFX100RF gave me 101.8 MP to work with. The original frame included the curb, a traffic light pole on the left, and a cluttered right edge. I cropped to a tight vertical — 20.1 MP remaining — that eliminated all of it. The streetcar became dominant. The reflection filled the foreground. The crop is what made the shot.
That’s the practical argument for medium format: I can crop 80% of the frame and still have a publishable image.
Everything else in post:
- Pulled highlights to recover the sky from blown-out white to moody grey
- Lifted shadows selectively in the reflection — the puddle detail was there in the RAW, just buried
- Boosted contrast to get the deep blacks the flat RAW was missing
- Cooled white balance slightly — the RAW had a warm/green cast that fought the urban mood
The colour temperature mattered. The grey sky and wet pavement read cool. The streetcar red reads warm. That tension already existed in the scene. Processing just had to stop working against it.
What made it the best shot of the walk
I took 14 frames that entire walk. Five of them were this streetcar.
I saw the puddle first. That’s the honest sequence — the puddle caught my eye, and I positioned myself before the streetcar arrived. When car 4555 came around the bend, I already knew what I wanted. Five frames, one keeper.
That’s not luck. That’s the difference between reacting to a scene and reading it.
The difference between this and a forgettable shot was:
- A scene worth shooting (King Street, post-rain)
- A position decision (get low, stay low)
- Timing (the right moment in the streetcar’s approach)
- One piece of luck I couldn’t control (the blue jacket)
That ratio — skill, decision, timing, luck — is probably about right for street photography. You can’t manufacture the luck. But you can stack the other three in your favour.
That’s the practice.